Halftone processes suffer a number of problems including moire effects and colour shift. Production of images using these processes involves a compromise between the perceptible impact of different undesirable effects. Reference is made to U.S. Pat. No. 5,680,222 from the present inventor, and also to Colour Screening Technology: A Tutorial on the Basic Issues, The Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing, Vol 6, No.3, October 1991, for background information on these effects.
Moire includes both large and small scale effects due to periodic alignment of the halftone dots on a set of screens which are used to represent different colours and black. The colours are typically determined by the CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) system although various other separation systems are also used. Spurious moire patterns including lines and rosettes have frustrated printers for many years as indicated in the Seybold article mentioned above. Methods have been proposed to reduce these effects with varying degrees of success in varying circumstances.
Colour shift occurs when the dots of different colour separations or black overlap more or less than intended due to mis-registration of their respective patterns. For example, cyan and magenta inks are relatively intense in relation to yellow ink, and an increased overlap of the microscopic printing areas of one or other intense ink on yellow ink can reduce the intended visual impact of the yellow. A slight displacement of the halftone patterns, for example, or stretching of the medium on which the coloured image is eventually printed, can create an overlap and cause an inaccurate reproduction of the original colours.
Traditional halftone patterns or screens are generally Aorthogonal@ in that the printing areas are arranged in lines on a square or rectangular mesh. The Aprinting areas@ are dots in light tones which link in various ways to become extended regions in darker tones. A Ascreen@ is formed for each of the respective colours or black in a selected colour system, and generally constitutes digital data for a computer-based process. Different screens may take a similar format but with different spacing between the lines of the mesh and a different angle of the lines from horizontal.